We’ve been screwed for a while. There have been McDonald’s play-set toys of one kind or another since I was a kid in the ’70’s. I don’t exactly think that photo is an omen of our doom, just more of a mile-marker along the road we’ve been on for some time. When I was a kid, McDonald’s toys weren’t made in China.

My cousin had this http://tinyurl.com/3syhwzc when we were kids and I was jealous as hell, although I don’t recall eating at McDonald’s very often. Once in a great while, maybe. And now here I am! Turns out, coveting a McDonald’s little people playset did not diminish my goals for my life or turn me into a tea-partier, and the kids who want to play with the drive-through set-up probably won’t be scarred for life either. Sometimes, a toy is just a toy.

http://cousinavi.wordpress.com cousinavi

Sometimes a toy is just a toy. Other times you can draw a fairly straight line between the engineer and a Mechano set.

It is truly a sad thing that somewhere someone is going to take a job at a McD’s drive-thru – perhaps not BECAUSE of the toy but with the memory of having played McD’s drive-thru as a child.
Even if they happen to find the coincidence amusing, it’s just fuckin’ depressing.

I have no idea where the Hungry Hungry Hippo kids wound up.
The Lite-Brite addicts are probly all in Vegas.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Rick-Janes/607039439 Rick Janes

Well, this can cut both ways; I know a woman who loved her Easy-Bake oven as a child and now hates cooking.

It’s refreshing to know that there are still some Americans working on Wall Street who financially support the electoral undermining of current right wing conservatism. But Warren Buffet comes to mind, so that must mean some people on Wall Street support Democratic party policies like the “Buffet Tax,” if it means keeping the right wing lunatics from power. Because Republicans and their collective idiot plans to deregulate Wall Street actually gives an unfair advantage to the idea of too big to fail, a colossal force in market manipulation and active hindrance to better competition. Giving money to Democrats is an overture to restore some semblance of rules and structure. Favoring more competition on a more level playing field isn’t a devious plot. It’s an act of self preservation.

Oil corporations, which give 75% of their combined political contributions to Republicans, actively bottle up alternative energy development and related sciences by buying up the ‘little guy’ patents, burning and censoring alternative solutions like a witch bitterly cursing beauty for power. There might be some venture capitalists and support network of legal firms on Wall Street who might want to have a chance to compete with the energy market dominance of oil corporations– Which kind of taps into what Louis CK was talking about with big box store corporate models sucking up the “mom & pops” and leaving a desolate void when it eventually robs the community of an identity on the way down the bankruptcy drain. Oil corporations are operating in ways that will leave us with no readily viable alternative when they pack up and leave after that last finite drop is inevitably tapped. Much more fundamentally dangerous in the Earthscape panorama than money managers.

If this is the electoral system we must navigate, I’ll reluctantly welcome the acceptance of Wall Street money to elect more Democrats who at their core simply seek a more stable and equitable symbiosis with Wall Street.

But Republicans knowingly tried to crash the economy and have obstructed at every turn government’s role in regulating the flow of commerce. If there were a more accurate analogy to this than them grabbing the wheel and trying to jerk us off a cliff in a jaded lover’s last stand I haven’t heard it. They’re bad for American business interests, Wall Street business interests, the promotion of progress and innovation, new investments, market competition… national security, civil rights, creativity, basic math.

The market is speaking.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Rick-Janes/607039439 Rick Janes

Good analysis, mrbrink, and certainly much of it is true, but the GOP thinking is much more basic and crude, imo. They think if they crash the economy completely, their One Percent benefactors will be filthy rich and everyone else will be dirt poor and begging for jobs at any wage. No more unions, pensions, benefits, gov’t social programs, middle-class (except a few hairdressers to the wealthy and the like), and only a small group needs to be educated to keep the computers and robots running. They are incapable of seeing the Big Picture on this: if the middle-class collapses, there will be no market for the products and services that keep the wealthy wealthy, and few investors left. (Some corporations, like Walmart, believe they can build up the Asian market to replace the American market. I’m sure you see the glaring flaws in that logic.) These modern plutocrats are as dumb and arrogant as the aristocrats in the court of King Louis XVI. They have lived in the lap of luxury so removed from the 99 Percent for so long, they can’t appreciate what’s going on in the streets. They have gotten away with their act so long, they seriously think Americans will swallow peonage in return for ‘balancing the budget,’ ‘paying off the deficit’ or some other glib catch phrase. As with the aristocrats during the time of the Bourbon dynasty, they are in for a rude awakening, but at least they won’t face the guillotine this time around.

http://drangedinaz.wordpress.com/ IrishGrrrl

Oh don’t bet that they won’t see a guillotine….if the masses do ever get roused to that point…I think the 1 percenters will terrified and will be begging for a guillotine as opposed to the alternative of being torn limb from limb by mobs of angry, starving people.